Towards Long-Term Economic and Social Stability in Central Asia and the Caucasus

Fiona Hill Page 1 10/08/02 Brookings Institution DRAFT Chapter for JETRO Report on: “The New Geopolitical Reality of Central Asia and the Caucasus and Prospects in Economic Dimensions” Part 3: Keys to the Future Economic Development in Central Asia and the Caucasus The Prospects for Long-Term Economic and Social Stability in Central Asia and the South Caucasus Introduction From 1991 until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States, the states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus were often considered by U.S. and other international policymakers as a single geographic unit. Along with Russia and Iran, they are part of the broadest extension of the Caspian Sea Basin. They are crossroads for transportation and communication between Europe and Asia, and between Russia and the countries of the Middle East and South Asia. They shared a common political and economic development as part of the Soviet Union for more than seventy years. And, after the dissolution of the USSR, they all emerged as independent, but fragile states, with nascent national identities and a staggering array of challenges in creating new political and economic systems. Although Central Asia and the South Caucasus share a common set of problems, they are also two very sharply distinct regions with their own external and internal dynamics. Even within the shared Soviet space the regions had different histories and cultures and, today, each country must contend with its own particular challenges in its own way. The transition from the Soviet command economy and authoritarian political system has been much more complex and difficult than anticipated for Central Asia and the South Caucasus. The Central Asian states were the poorest and least developed in the USSR, and both sets of states had to begin almost from scratch in their development in the 1990s. Progress in market reforms, institutional development, and democratic reform has been limited. Attempts at macro-economic reform have led to economic stabilization but have not been matched by local-level developments. Thanks to extensive borrowing from international financial institutions, reforms have saddled regional states with high and unsustainable debt burdens. Governments are weak, poorly committed to economic reform priorities and reluctant to engage in political or sub- regional reform efforts. Instability in Central Asia, the risk of failing to consolidate peace in Afghanistan, and intractable ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus threaten further progress. The prospects for long-term economic and social stability in Central Asia and the South Caucasus are, therefore, uncertain. They are dependent on the governments’ and the international development community’s ability to capitalize upon the inter-linkages and dependencies within and between the two regions while, at the same time, acknowledging the states differences when responding to individual needs and circumstances. Fiona Hill Page 2 10/08/02 Brookings Institution The Challenges of Independence Before 1991, the states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus were marginal backwaters, republics of the Soviet Union that played no major role in the relationships among the principal regional powers of the USSR, Turkey, Iran, and China. Nor, unlike Ukraine or the Baltic States, were they a factor in the Cold War relationship between the USSR and the United States. But in the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with the re-discovery of the energy resources of the Caspian Sea, and engendered a series of violent political upheavals. Increasingly over the last decade, the states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus have gained international attention as zones of great power competition and conflict. The exploitation of Caspian Basin energy resources attracted the attention of a range of international oil companies, including American majors, and eventually became a point of tension in U.S.-Russian relations. Secessionist conflicts in the South Caucasus, civil war in Tajikistan, two wars in Chechnya, and faltering political and economic reforms provided a fertile ground for the germination of radical and militant groups, as well as the infiltration of foreign Islamic networks. As the casualties in conflicts and economic, political and social problems mounted, populations became increasingly disaffected, spawning militant Muslim groups like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which first sought to overthrow the government of President Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan and later espoused greater ambitions for the creation of an Islamic caliphate (state) across Central Asia. Russia’s brutal assault on Chechnya brought religious fighters from other wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia into the conflict, greatly complicating the prospects for a political solution and sending fighters and refugees south across Russia’s borders into Georgia and Azerbaijan. The fact that the administrative divisions the states inherited as international borders from the USSR in 1991 were all created on the principle of divide and rule from Moscow has shaped many of these conflicts. Without Moscow to play the role of arbiter, these borders became unruly, contested divisions, fracturing ethnic groups, rupturing trade and communication routes, and breaking economic and political interdependencies. Over the last ten years of independence, the political divisions between and among the Central Asian and South Caucasus states have hardened. At the same time, the borders (having previously been lines on a map rather than physical structures) have remained porous to illicit trade (including weapons and drugs smuggling) and the spread of infectious disease. Independence has not been kind to Central Asia and the South Caucasus. In losing Moscow as the center of gravity, the states also lost crucial Soviet subsidies for budgets, enterprises and households, inputs for regional industries, markets for their products, transportation routes and communications with the outside world (much of which was previously filtered through the Soviet capital). The World Bank estimates that as a result of these disruptions, the Central Asian states alone saw their economies decline between 1990-1996 by 20-60% of GDP. In some states, like Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, this led to a government retreat from many aspects of daily life, in particular from the provision of a social safety net. In turn, it resulted in the evident “primitivization” of the states, with the energies of the population becoming focused on household subsistence and shuttle trade instead of mobilizing behind crucial economic and Fiona Hill Page 3 10/08/02 Brookings Institution political reforms. As a result, even the Soviet-era attainments in health, education, infrastructure, and industrial development have gradually eroded. Despite the limited degree of macro-economic stability and growth that the Central Asian and South Caucasus economies achieved after 1996, they were set back again in 1998 by the Asian and Russian financial crises. The crises led to the devaluation of currencies and the withdrawal of foreign investment. By 2002, there was another modest recovery, especially in states such as energy-rich Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, which have seen their budget revenues bolstered by a sharp rise in world oil and gas prices between 1999-2001, but landlocked, resource poor countries like Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia have had little success in effecting a turn around. In Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, severe regional drought in 2001 put them at risk of a major humanitarian disaster. A staggering 70-80% of their populations have fallen beneath the poverty line according to World Bank estimates, which puts them among the poorest of the developing countries. In fact, all the Central Asian and South Caucasus states have limited potential for development outside the energy sector. Even for the energy self-sufficient states of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan major questions must still be addressed about how to diversify their economies effectively to restore and develop water resources, agriculture, and the manufacturing sector. The post-independence economic difficulties for the states have been compounded by the fact that regional conflicts have left hundreds of thousands of people displaced, especially in the South Caucasus. In Azerbaijan alone there are more than 500,000 internal refugees (IDPS) who remain homeless ten years after being expelled from the region around Nagorno-Karabakh, and who are poorly integrated into the rest of Azeri society. The large numbers of IDPs have strained government programs, especially for housing and education. Twenty percent of Azerbaijan’s schools, for example, were abandoned as a result of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the students have been placed in the remaining schools, causing severe overcrowding. IDP children manifest serious declines in literacy, which has set back the country’s considerable gains in education during the Soviet period. Residents of Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, where a large number of the IDPs have sought refuge, complain of rising crime rates with the influx of displaced people and a change in the city’s social profile. Similar phenomena can be observed in Georgia and its capital, Tbilisi, as a result of the refugee crisis from the conflict in Abkhazia. In recent years, as a result of this economic deprivation and the dislocation of population, there has been a massive exodus of ethnic Russians and highly-skilled members of

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